Category: hope

Staggering

Featured ~ Kristin ~ 1 Comment

The human capacity for emotion is staggering. How do I know this? I’m staggering.

In the last seventy-two hours I have felt contentment, fatigue, joy, satisfaction, frustration, annoyance, responsibility, discontent, dissatisfaction, love, pride, calm, irritability, anger, happiness, anticipation, gratitude, betrayal, shame, hurt, connectedness, emptiness, gratitude, concern, apathy, hopelessness, and deep sadness. And those are just the ones that come to mind right now.

How did I feel so much in just three days time? Did I go to a wedding? a funeral? a spiritual retreat? Nope. I went to work, came home, went to a graduation party, and came home again.

We can have all kinds of feelings in the midst of our everyday life.

I have known this my whole life. I was, if you remember, labelled “moodiest” in my high school yearbook. That label had all kinds of judgment and shame attached to it, and I felt it. The people who labelled me didn’t know my experience and why I had so much emotion. And I didn’t know yet that my bandwidth for emotional expression was my superpower.

It doesn’t always feel like a superpower, though. It sure didn’t on Friday when I went from the pleasure of watching three LGBTQ+ students participate in an online conference — sitting in my room with one of their advisors, listening to presenters, coloring, and finding a small pocket of safety away from their usual volatile surroundings — to the stress of navigating a chaotic high school hallway back to the quiet contentment of sitting at my desk, planning the details for next week’s instruction, to the frustration of failing to capture the combined attention of nine erratic and impulsive freshmen.

Then, I was faced with the challenge of metabolizing the adrenaline from feeling disrespected in my own space so that I could traverse the once-again chaotic hallways and become an “effective” supervisor of a hundred or so young adolescents on the Friday of a full moon as they remained “contained” in the unimpressive space of an out-of-date gym eating a subpar lunch. I made my way there, as I always do, continuously processing the inequities of my students’ realities — the very ones that contribute to their impulsivity and disrespectful behavior. A coworker and I stood together, quietly venting while intermittently addressing the most egregious behaviors such as vaping — which is prohibited — and running — which the students really need, but which is not tenable in such a small space.

From there, annoyed, I walked — again — through the chaotic hallway, calling out, “head to class, everyone!” I grabbed some supplies from my room and gathered two ninth graders (have I mentioned it was a full moon) from their assigned classes so that we could do a reading intervention where I fluctuated between pride (“nice job!”) and irritability (“put your phone down and look at this page”). I then had to shake off that tension and shift my mind and emotions to the impartial business of grading and then make “non-emotional” phone calls to the parents of the feral freshmen who had disrespected me earlier, saying “please remind your students that we have just six weeks to finish strong.”

I packed up my things for the weekend, and felt less irritated than I imagined as I made an additional phone call to book five hotel rooms for family members who are attending my daughter’s wedding this summer. In fact, I felt a little pleased with myself for finally checking it off my list, and I chatted playfully with my colleague as we shared our ride home. Then I got a little miffed when I discovered that my husband and father-in-law were sitting in our living room, simultaneously wanting me to sit and chat and expecting that at some point we would eat dinner, which I had yet to prepare.

The visit was expected, and I had a plan, but I am always tired on Fridays, and I really wanted to pour a glass of wine, curl up in a blanket, and watch something ridiculously pointless on TV, but I conjured up a meal, did my best to chat for a bit, and then retreated to my puzzle table in the basement where I sat non-communicatively listening to the men chat upstairs.

Of course I couldn’t sleep because I was still mentally processing my ineffectiveness during the one class I had to teach, so I got back up and watched mindless television until I could barely keep myself conscious.

The next morning, I manufactured cheer for my father-in-law as I presented him and my husband with breakfast before running to the store for a few groceries, a gift, and a fistful of Mother’s Day cards then returning home to shower and dress in preparation for my friend’s graduation party. I was feeling satisfied in managing all of these details until I was suddenly and unexpectedly blindsided by a revelation of broken trust and personal betrayal that spiraled me into a dark anger (shielding hurt) that had to somehow be processed or parked so that I could show up for the friend who had overcome multiple obstacles to earn a master’s degree while working full time.

As I drove to her place, I mentally chose to set the new information on the shelf so that I could show up in a room where I knew no one and lend my hands to decorate tables, set out food, and mingle [even more chatting] with strangers. I posed for a photo, ate [and raved] over excellent food, and then [two hours later] repeated my congratulations and headed back home.

Alone, at last, I changed into work clothes, went to my garden, and kneeled in the dirt, determinedly pressing dried seeds from last year’s harvest into the soil, hoping against all probability that God can once again bring life from death, healing from brokenness, trust from betrayal.

How many times can He perform a resurrection?

How many times can the broken be made whole?

I have an insufferable belief in restoration, but I am staggering, friends, and I am very, very tired.

I made my way back to the puzzle, and sat, feeling my hurt and fatigue, and then, one of ours who has been through so much devastation of her own sent a photo — her left hand with a diamond on the ring finger. And I had to admit that God never grows weary of making all things new.

May it ever be so.

[Inhale] I have been restored and upheld, and I will praise you.

Second Half Living

Featured ~ Kristin ~ Leave a comment

A couple of years ago, I turned 55.

I imagine when some people hit an age like 55, they begin to think about retirement and the end of their careers, but since I had already been in a long season where I thought my career was over and had recently returned to my profession, I was still energized about teaching, still excited about being in the classroom, and still looking forward to many more years.

That didn’t stop the reality of my age though — the fact that the number 55 is just ten years away from 65, the age when Americans qualify for Medicare.

Ten years sounds like a long time until you glance backward and realize that ten years ago was when I first visited a rheumatologist, when we first considered moving back to Michigan, and when we were starting to say goodbye to St. Louis, to our teenagers, and to the life we had come to know.

It wasn’t that long ago, and ten more years will surely pass quickly.

I think it was out of the recognition of that reality that I jokingly declared 55 to be my halfway point — I was going to live to be 110!

I was finally enjoying life again having learned to manage my chronic illness and having navigated a long season of grief. I was learning so much about myself — what makes me tick, what I like, what I don’t like, how I think, how I believe, what makes me wonder, and what I want to impact. Surely I needed another half a lifetime to further explore what I was learning and to put that learning to good use.

Now, who knows whether I will actually live to be 110 or 85, or 58, but regardless, I am certainly in the second half of life, what Carl Jung and Richard Rohr describe as the phase of “undoing much of what has been accomplished in the first half in order to get at a deeper heart of human life.”

Rohr (and Jung) say that the first half of life is “focussed on the development and enhancement of our Ego and its mind-set: ambitions, plans, competitiveness, judgments about others, looking after oneself, one’s career, one’s family” and mine certainly was! Didn’t you, like me, run from high school to college to marriage to children to parenting and career, making snap decisions to take care of yourself and those that you loved only to come to the screeching realization around 45 or so that many of those decisions, though well-intentioned and possibly even prayerful and consulted upon, were ill-founded, poorly motivated, and simply wrong?

Didn’t you, like me, stand in the wreckage, grieving, wondering how it passed so quickly and why we don’t get a chance at a do-over?

That, according to Rohr, is the kind of devastation that leads to the openness that allows for growth in the second half of life. He says, “The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further.’

Sheesh. Does that make me feel any better? I don’t know.

What it does help me lean into though, is my current reality.

I am, at now 57, learning more and changing more than I believe I have at any other time in my life. I have not only a therapist but also not one, but two, instructional coaches, and a small group that my husband and I meet with weekly. My therapist is helping me unlearn behaviors that are deeply rooted in my childhood — ways of coping that once allowed me to navigate my realities that became patterns that are no longer useful. My instructional coaches help me see how strategies that were effective in the classrooms I served in the 1990s and early 2000s can be modified to meet the needs of the students I have now. Our small group provides a judgment-free space in which to interrogate long-held beliefs, to sit in unanswered complexity, to admit our failures vulnerably, and to be loved unconditionally.

Thirty year old me wouldn’t have received so much input from others. She was busy kicking butts and taking names — doing what she needed to do to look after herself and her family. She “knew” she was right and she didn’t have time for the input of others.

But after all those “right” moves and the “supposed achievements” of that era have fallen apart, I’m in a new position.

I am, as they say, “coachable”.

I was getting ready for an uncomfortable encounter recently, and the anxiety was building as the date grew closer, so I kept bringing up the pending situation with my therapist. Because of my history in similar situations — of feeling unheard, undervalued, and “tolerated”, I had some real emotions, so I couldn’t see clearly. I could no longer define the purpose for the encounter — why was I going to meet with this person if the potential for hurt was so great? My therapist prompted me to think about what I needed from the interaction and reminded me to set my “past baggage at the door” so that it wouldn’t clutter the reality of the current situation. She helped me practice language to express my needs, and even though I had some anxiety throughout the interaction, I was able to manage my expectations and come away feeling content, even though the outcome might not have been exactly what I had pictured.

That’s something, isn’t it?

One of my instructional coaches and I are working on my ability to not let the way my students show up impact how I show up. You would think that after three decades in the classroom, I would have this down — that I would be steady Eddy in the face of student behavior, and for the most part I am. However, these past three years have put me to the test. The students I see today are in some ways very similar to the students I taught back in the fall of 1989. However, in some ways they are very different. They have been through a lot and they show up erratically — late, loud, hungry, irritable, disrespectful, and unconcerned about how their white middle-aged teacher might feel about it. Mostly, I greet them at the door smiling and hopeful and navigate through class with a no-nonsense approach, but guys, I am also a human being who gets tired, who loses her patience, and who falls back on muscle memory. I still have the default switch that flips over to kicking butts and taking names when the going gets tough, and while that might’ve worked in the past, today calls for a different strategy — a calm, sure response rather than a powerful reaction.

That was super easy to type, but much more complicated to execute.

Many of my students enter the classroom unable to leave their “past baggage at the door”.

(How could a teenager know how to do that, when I am still practicing at 57?)

They don’t leave it at the door, but they lug it right in, dripping debris in their path and dumping the entire mess all over my classroom. Picture all the shit of 20 or so teenagers heaped among the desks of my classroom. It’s a little crowded. And smelly. And uncomfortable.

One student shoves another student because she is crowding his space. Another puts her head down because she “just can’t deal” with the chaos. Others try to position themselves in such a way to ignore the heaping stench so that they can opt in to learning, complete their assignment, and move through their day.

My students don’t need me in those moments to shout or demand or ridicule. No, they need me to draw on the coaching that I am receiving and the years of experience I have gained from living my life dragging around a heaping pile of my own.

They need me to be unfazed by the stench. They need me to be prepared and engaging. They need me to have compassion when they “just can’t deal” and they need me to be nonjudgmental so that they can choose, at any moment, to join whatever it is we are doing.

I was having some difficulty with a particular student. We’ll call him Tyler. He comes to school almost every day, but he makes it to my class just once or twice a week. When he does come, he arrives late and loud, making comments that draw all the attention toward him, interrupting my class and disrupting any hope of learning.

I was complaining about this student to my coach and she said, “Make him feel like he is part of the classroom.”

I stared at her with jaw gaping,.

“Use what he has to say to direct him back to the class.”

As I sat staring at her, I realized that I had been falling back on old faithful — trying to get him in line by shaming him, telling him that the reason that he acts out is because he doesn’t know what we are doing, rather than doing everything I could to rope him in so that he would know what we are doing,

Damn.

And because I’m not still 30, not still sure that I have all the answers to everything, not still consumed with the advancement of my self and my family, I gulped and said, “Wow. You’re right.”

I went on to tell her that this very student had surprised me with his written work and that perhaps I could use it for a model in class. She said, “Don’t do that! He thrives on negative attention, and he will sabotage that attempt! Instead, tell him quietly, privately, that you were impressed with his work. Let him know that you see him, but do it quietly.”

And you know what? I did. And he received my compliment and turned in his assignment on time and lowered his volume just a little bit that day. It was a very little bit of movement in the right direction, but I will take it, because I know that he is still in the first half of life — he is still developing his ego, still looking after himself and his ambitions, and in his context, that is much more challenging than I think I could ever comprehend.

It’s quite a juxtaposition — me in my second half of life spending so much of my day surrounded by the unfiltered, confident bravado of teenagers, but I have to believe we were made for each other — they with their uncensored commentary on my wardrobe choices and teaching strategies followed by their genuine questions about what my prom was like and how I spend my money and me as a spectator in the room watching them navigate love, friendship, and loss as they plan for their future.

I know what’s coming for them — a season of challenge and discovery as they plan for and navigate their way into adulthood and the inevitable realization (at some point) that they’ve gotten a lot of things wrong. Maybe the best thing I can provide for them right now is a normalization of the fact that we make a lot of mistakes but that we can try again. We can learn, we can grow, and more importantly, we can give one another grace along the way. I think that’s what I wish I would’ve liked to have known in the first half of life. It’s what I’m thankful to know now.

for from His fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.”

John 1:16

The Art of the No

Featured ~ Kristin ~ Leave a comment

You know that time during the pandemic, when I was working full-time from home and I was outraged by the killing of George Floyd, and I felt called to go back to the classroom to return to fighting for educational equity? Do you remember how I’d been recovering from a major health crisis for almost six years and I felt I had finally arrived at a place of health that would support my return to this work?

Do you remember the first year — the fully virtual year where I sat in an empty classroom zooming with students I had never met in the flesh, students who may or may not have turned on their cameras to let me see their faces? Do you remember how giddy I was, how energized, how I found the work almost easy because I could get it all done within my scheduled work day and still have some space for self-care — for yoga, and walking, and therapy, and all the stuff I need to do to stay well?

And do you remember how even last year when we “returned” to in-person learning and I got to see my students face to face, I was thrilled? how I had enough steam to still maintain my physical and emotional health, probably because we regularly shifted to virtual learning and I could catch my breath and reset my rhythms from time to time? how it wasn’t until the very end of the year that the fatigue caught up with me and I lost my shit over a small unintentional slight on my students’ graduation day?

And do you remember how I committed last summer to being not only a master teacher, but also a reading interventionist, a cooperating teacher for a colleague who needed to student teach, and a fellow in the Michigan Teacher Leader Collaborative (MTLC)? How I wondered if saying yes to all of these responsibilities was was taking on too much or if I would finally find a limit to what I could do?

Yeah, guys, it appears that I have found that limit. I’m starting to see some warning flags.

However, I can’t always tell that I’m at my limit. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am on my game. I am an experienced teacher, so I see results. My students are learning and the data reflects that fact. I’m open to coaching because I see its impact on my instructional practices. I’m building relationships both in and out of school — relationships that are mutually impactful.

And the need is there! Each year I get asked to do more, to take on more responsibility, as all effective teachers do. And because we see the need — the students who might benefit from our instruction and the gaps that we might fill — we agree to do it. We fit in one more class, sit on one more committee, and assist with one more project. In a school building, everyone is busy, and there is always more to be done, so we take turns adding more to our to-do list.

And in some ways, it’s affirming. We feel needed and valued and appreciated when our leadership approaches us and says, “You are doing such a great job with all the things you are doing, and we want you to do even more!”

We get celebrated for our accomplishments. We get a pay bump. All is good!

But, guys, humans have limitations, and eventually all that piling on of responsibility, all that added weight, begins to drag a person down and their effectiveness begins to flag. They begin to feel fatigue. They make a sharp comment to a student or a colleague. They begin to wonder if they can sustain the rhythms. They begin to look at other opportunities where they might not have to work quite so hard.

Yet the offers to work even harder keep showing up. Right now I have an opportunity to apply to be a senior fellow for the MTLC. I will likely be asked to add another section of students for the reading intervention I do. I’ve already been slated to work on a committee to discuss our school’s improvement plan. And to be honest, I’d love to do it all. I really would. I am sitting in the heart of the work that I have been called to my entire career. This is what I was created for — to see systemic inequities in education, to bring excellent instructional practices to students who have historically not been well-served but who are highly capable nonetheless, to speak into the policies that perpetuate educational inequities, and to work at the school level to make change a reality. This is it, guys. This is my lane.

And if I want to stay here, in this lane, and continue to impact individual students, I have to have a boundary that allows me to remain healthy. I have to practice the art of the no,

No, I won’t be applying to be a senior fellow in the MTLC.

No, I won’t be adding another section of the reading intervention.

No, I won’t be writing an article for your publication, volunteering at your fundraiser, or teaching during your summer program.

I have to say no sometimes so that I will be able to continue my yes.

Yes, I will still teach seniors at Detroit Leadership Academy.

Yes, I will stay on the Cougars to College/Post-Secondary Plans team.

Yes, I will continue to do one section each semester of the Adolescent Accelerated Reading Intervention.

Yes, I will continue to sit on the leadership team, support the overall success of this school, and participate in visioning and implementing practices that work to eliminate systemic inequities that disadvantage students of color.

The yesses are so important that I have to practice the art of the no. I have to guard my time, my space, my influence so that it has the most sustainable impact in the lane that is most important to me.

I have to practice the art of the no, so that I can say yes to myself, even though that is contrary to much of what I was taught. I need to oxygenate myself first — through yoga, and writing, and reading, and rest, and play — so that I have the health and the energy to say yes to the people that I love — my husband, my children, my grandchildren, my parents, and my friends — and to those that I serve — my students and my colleagues.

This is a learned practice, my friends. I have learned (and am still learning) how to say no because I once too often said yes, sure, of course, I can do that. And I piled on responsibility after responsibility while fully denying the needs of myself, my family, and my friends. I paid a high price with my health and my relationships. And I’m not willing to do that again.

We are not called to be all things to all people. We are called to use our gifts as part of the body, part of the system, part of a mechanism that utilizes the strengths of each individual to benefit the whole. We are called to support one another, and to encourage one another to take rest and to stay well, and to celebrate each of those individual strengths.

My strength, my husband playfully said last week, is “an insufferable belief in restoration”.

I believe in restoration because I am very noticeably being restored — physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally. I don’t take that for granted, and I won’t throw it away. I will practice the art of the no, so that I can carry my “insufferable belief in restoration” into a few little spaces who need someone like me.

What more can a girl hope for?

‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.”

2Cor 12:9

Gem of the Week: Kia*

Featured ~ Kristin ~ 2 Comments

This is the second in a sporadic series.

I met Kia last September. She had done poorly on last year’s NWEA MAP testing and had been identified, along with seven others from among our incoming freshman class, as being most in need of the Adolescent Accelerated Reading Intervention, the program I had been trained in last summer. (I described what our classroom’s version of AARI looks like in this post.)

I started pulling these eight into my classroom, one by one, to evaluate them by way of the QRI — The Qualitative Reading Inventory. This assessment requires students to first read lists of words sorted by grade level to determine their basic skills of decoding and identifying sight words — the ability to get words off the page. Some of my students read these lists fairly independently up to 6th, 7th, and 8th grade level; a few could barely make it through a second grade list. Once I got a glimpse at their ability to read, I had them read grade-level passages and answer comprehension questions — some that were easy to identify from the text, others that required inference. The majority of the eight freshmen I tested demonstrated the ability to read and comprehend at levels between the third and fifth grade; three were frustrated at first grade level or below.

How do students get to their freshmen year reading only at the first through fifth grade level? I suspect two reasons.

First, my students have grown up in Detroit Public Schools (and the charter schools, like mine, within that district) where they have received inconsistent instruction for a variety of reasons such as low attendance of both students and staff, insufficient funding and resources, and multiple out-of-school factors that impact learning such as housing and food insecurity, domestic disruption, trauma, and other realities that have grown out of centuries of systemic racism.

Second, even in the best of schools in the wealthiest of communities, the data shows COVID’s impact on learning over the last two years. Even students who had mostly face-to-face instruction over the two years of the pandemic have scored lower on standardized tests than expected. Students like mine, who had little to no schooling in the Spring of 2020 due to lack of technology and Internet connectivity, followed by one year of virtual instruction where they had to attempt to log in and focus despite many barriers including poor Internet, other siblings in the home (maybe even in the same room), family responsibilities, and the like, followed by another year of continuous transition between in-person and virtual instruction due to insufficient staffing, high COVID rates, and building issues, have been impacted much more dramatically. And, in addition to not being in school, most of my students report that they read very little or not at all between March 2020 and September 2022. That’s thirty months away from reading

It’s no wonder that when it was Kia’s turn to come into my room, she was a little nervous. She giggled a lot and apologized for missing words but did her best. I found her to be comfortable reading at the third grade level; the fourth grade passage was frustrating.

She has been in my room since September. I should say, she has sometimes been in my room since September. She’s been absent thirty-three times. And, on about a half-dozen occasions when she’s been in my class, she has fallen asleep to the degree that I have been unable to wake her. When she is present and awake, she is either fully engaged and a star participant or is having an emotional meltdown in response to a teasing comment from one of the boys in the class. She has demonstrated very little consistency, staying power, or resiliency.

So, when I pulled her out of class to retest her this past Tuesday, the first day back in the building after a two-week break, I did not have high expectations. I had already tested most of the others who had improved their reading scores by 1-3 grade levels in just one semester! I was hopeful, despite her poor attendance, that she would demonstrate the same growth.

We found a quiet corner of the building, and I asked, “Are you ready for this?”

“I’m nervous,” she replied.

“You’re going to do fine,” I said. “In fact, you’ve been telling me all semester that you don’t need this class. Here is your chance to prove it to me!”

I started her with a fifth grade passage, assuming two years’ worth of growth, and she aced it. We moved to the sixth grade passage. She missed a couple comprehension questions, but still fell in the ‘instructional’ range, so we moved on to the next passage which is labelled “upper middle school”. Again, she missed only a couple questions on a dense passage about the life cycle of stars, so we moved to a high school level passage. The text was two single-spaced pages with illustrations describing the functions of DNA and RNA. It took her a while to respond to the questions, as she had permission, according to QRI instructions, to go back to the text and find the answers, but she found them — enough to fall in the “instructional” range once again.

As I watched her read and then search for answers — her determination to prove that she could do this — I was getting choked up. The others had tried hard, too, but she was clearly on a different level.

When she finished, I said, “Kia, how do you feel?”

“I feel good!”

“Do you know what level you started at in September?”

“No.”

“You were comfortable at third grade level. Fourth grade level was frustrating.”

“Oh my God!” she said, covering her face in embarrassment.

“Be kind to yourself!” I explained. “We were just coming back after COVID! It was a very difficult time! How much did you read during COVID?”

“Nothing,” she said with a sheepish grin on her face.

“Right! Do you know you just read a complex biology text at the high school level?” I could barely get the words out because my throat was tightening.

“I did?”

“You understood all that stuff about cells and DNA and replication! Everybody can’t do that!”

She looked at me, locking eyes.

“Kia, you could be a nurse!”

“That’s what I want to be!” she smiled broadly.

“You can! You are very bright!”

She started crying, too. We hugged. I passed her a tissue, then I pulled myself together.

“Listen, Kia, I’m gonna be real with you. You have the stuff it takes to be a nurse, but you aren’t going to get there unless something changes. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I gotta come to school.”

“Yes, you’ve got to come to school. If you want to get into a nursing program, you need As and Bs from now on, and you have the ability to do that.”

We talked a little bit longer about how I was going to be after her, checking in on her, even after she has left my class when the semester ends in two weeks. Then we walked through the halls telling administrators and teachers about what she had accomplished — we needed to celebrate.

Everyone applauded her, hugged her, congratulated her — she was beaming.

The next day Kia showed up in my room before school asking to borrow a laptop. She’d lost her charger and hers was dead — had been dead for weeks. I loaned her my laptop, and said, “Here’s a charger. You can keep it.”

“Thank you! Now I can get caught up at home!”

She came to my class later that day, sat up straight, answered questions, and smiled broadly.

She dropped by my room the next day to say, “I’m making up all my missing work, Mrs. Rathje, and I’m staying awake in all my classes.”

“Amazing, Kia! Keep going!”

Do I think that Kia’s ability to read improved nine — 9! — grade levels in one semester? No. However, I think that some basic skills that had gone dormant during COVID were re-engaged. I believe Kia’s brain, like many others I see every day, had learned to “sleep” during the trauma and disruption of COVID, and needed to be woken up.

AARI for an hour a day five days a week, despite her absences, was enough to wake her up, and realizing her potential was the cup of coffee that put her in motion.

I tested Kia on Tuesday, and she was still going strong on Friday. I suspect her momentum will fluctuate. She’ll have hard days, she’ll get discouraged, and she’ll be tempted to go back to sleep, if just to get some relief.

She’s gonna need all kinds of encouragement to build the stamina she’ll need to make it all the way to a nursing degree, because all of the obstacles didn’t magically go away. She’s still going to have to get herself up every morning. She’s still going to have to show up. She’s going to have to learn to tune out the voices of adolescent boys who like to get a reaction out of her. She’s going to have to overcome a lot more than what I see on the surface — whatever is going on at home that allowed her to miss thirty-three days of school, whatever reason there is for the fact that she needs glasses and hasn’t had then for the entire first semester, whatever has happened in her life that makes her so tender to break down so easily from everyday jabs of a few adolescent boys.

She’ll leave my class at the end of this semester, but our school is small, and I will make an effort to see her most days — to engage with her and to wave the cup of coffee under her nose, to remind her of the future that is possible for her.

But mostly it’s going to be up to her to do the next hard thing day after day after day. It’s gonna get tiring. And lonely. And the odds are against her.

But with some determination and a few miracles, she just might make it.

May God make her path straight and may He raise up a great cloud of witnesses to cheer her on her way.

I’m happy to be one among the crowd shouting “Keep going! You’re almost there!”

*Name changed for confidentiality.

A String of Miracles

Featured ~ Kristin ~ Leave a comment

We purchased the gifts and wrapped them. We planned menus, purchased loads and loads of food, and baked ourselves silly. We cleaned the house and made all the beds, and then we waited.

As we sat on the coach, staring at Netflix, the texts started to come in.

“We’re checked in at the hotel! See you in the morning!”

“Our flight just landed!”

“We should be there in an hour!”

And then our family started rolling in — from Ohio, from Massachusetts, from Missouri.

We hugged, we laughed, and we ate.

We puzzled; we played games. We did crafts, watched movies, and traveled to celebrate with even more family.

It sounds like what most families do over the holidays, but I suppose many families, like ours, can get together like this only because of a string of miracles — only because of choosing forgiveness, of going to therapy, and of healing and time and the stubborn belief that things get better.

Didn’t you, too, have the holiday where everyone was yelling at each another?

And the one where no one spoke a word?

And the one where everyone walked out of church sobbing?

And the one where some decided they just. couldn’t. do it — not this year.

And then there was the covid year (or years — who remembers?) where we packed presents into flat rate boxes and stood in line for hours at the post office, hoping our parcels would get there before Easter. The year (or was it two?) where we sat in Zoom rooms with family members, some of us trying not to hog the air time, others trying to endure those who were hogging the air time.

It seems after all those difficult years we might have stopped believing that we could once again be all in one space, laughing, eating, agreeing on what to watch, moving upstairs to open the gifts, and leaning together over a puzzle, snacking on chips and rock candy and cookies.

But we didn’t stop believing — really — did we?

Didn’t we keep hoping for the day when all the therapy would pay off? Didn’t we long for the moment when we all laughed at the same joke, all smiled at the same memory, all managed to load ourselves and our gifts and bags full of food into cars only to discover most of the way there that we had left the main dish warming in the oven and no one lost their shit but we rebounded easily, picking up take out on the way?

Didn’t we imagine it could happen? Didn’t we dream it?

And so I’m sitting here pinching myself, trying to believe that it actually happened. And someone in the Christmas 2022 group chat sends a text checking on someone else who left the festivities feeling subpar. Another sends a pic of a present that broke upon opening, and everyone laughs. More pics are shared, more laughter, and then a commitment to what we will do next year.

They want to do it again next year.

I need a moment to just take that in.

Every family relationship doesn’t get this gift, does it? We don’t all get the moments we prayed for.

Don’t we all have at least one relationship where we do all the initiating? where tender topics are avoided? where our hearts ache with disappointment at the end of each phone call? where we can’t shake the feeling of being unwanted?

In fact, I was sitting in therapy the very day that the last of our family left, on the come down, for sure, and all I managed was, “our Christmas was amazing, but this one relationship over here still sucks and that’s all I can think about.”

And over the hour of belaboring the one less-than-stellar relationship I have spent most of my life bemoaning, my therapist offered suggestions, role-playing, expectation-setting, and the like, and near the end of the session, I began to realize that the beauty we experienced with our family at Christmas didn’t come without the hard work of many — of all of us, really.

I can’t expect this other relationship to magically transform on its own. If I want something different, I’ll need to return — to my knees, to forgiveness, to therapy, to the stubborn belief that things can get better.

It’s risky — even just the hoping for change — because happy endings or even happy moments are not guaranteed. I might experience disappointment — again.

But I might risk hoping, and a series of miracles might just happen. We might laugh at the same joke or smile at the same memory. We might play a game together or lean toward each other over a puzzle. We might agree on a movie. We might enjoy a meal.

And it might be amazing.

Witnessing the string of miracles that led to an amazing Christmas has me thinking that I just might risk hoping again.

[He] is able to do far more than we would ever dare to ask or even dream of”

Ephesians 3:20

A Week’s Journey

Featured ~ Kristin ~ 2 Comments
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I clicked ‘publish’ on last week’s blog, jumped in my vehicle, and drove to school. By the time I got there I had a text message, “I want to feed your students!”

At the end of last week’s post about my developing freshman readers, I had mentioned that they eat a ton and had invited my readers to a) support any teachers they know with gifts of snacks, or to b) help me feed mine. A close friend and fellow educator was the first to raise her hand and say, “pick me, pick me!” It’s such an encouragement to me when any of you reach out — you read my blog, you ask me about my students, you send cash for feminine supplies, or you buy snacks, and I feel encouraged to keep going.

Within a couple of hours, two retired teachers (who taught some of my children!) reached out with a very generous gift of support and another educator who got connected to my blog through a mutual friend, emailed to say “snacks are on the way!”

Monday night the Amazon trucks started arriving. By Tuesday morning, I had a large tote to carry in to school full of protein bars, fruit snacks, and candy,

Why do I need so many snacks? Because I have 80 students of my own who come into my class most days and many more who have become aware that “Mrs. Rathje probably has something.” Students come to me to borrow chargers, to get a bandaid, or to ask for feminine supplies, deodorant, or something to eat. Our school provides breakfast and lunch to all of our students, but breakfast often looks like a juice box, a granola bar, and an apple — hardly enough to hold a teenager until lunch time. Lunch might be pizza, “walking tacos” (taco fixings piled inside a snack-sized bag of Doritos), or more standard school lunch fare like chicken with mashed potatoes, all of which sound decent, but each of these arrives in large insulated boxes which cafeteria workers open up before distributing the food through a window in the gym where the teeming masses fight for a place in line. It’s loud and chaotic. You get one choice, and if you don’t like that, you are, as they say, out of luck. Many kids do eat what is provided, but some check out in a “quiet” corner, where they mind their own business and scroll on their phones.

Whether they’ve eaten or not, teenagers are always persistently hungry.

I don’t give snacks every day, but students know that if they missed breakfast, if they are going straight to work after school, or if they are just plain hungry, they can ask, and I will have something.

So, I hauled snacks into school Tuesday morning, and Tuesday afternoon, instead of going back home, I drove north for a two-day conference. The Michigan College Access Network (MCAN) was having its annual conference at a casino in Mt. Pleasant, MI, and I had received a scholarship to attend on behalf of my school and the Michigan Teacher Leader Collaborative (MTLC), of which I am currently a fellow.

When the conference started Tuesday morning, I learned about state funding for students like mine that has been made available in the wake of Covid and a disengagement in postsecondary enrollment. We’re talking millions of dollars! As the director of MCAN said, we have right now “unprecedented funding for unprecedented impact.”

Over lunch, I learned about LA Room and Board an organization that provides housing for the 1 out of 5 community college students in Los Angeles who are homeless.

The next day, I learned about the Digital Equity Act, a bi-partisan $2.75 billion initiative that provides funding for building out Internet infrastructure, providing devices, and increasing digital literacy so that “everyone – no matter where they live – can fully participate in our society, democracy, and economy,” and that means college access, job preparation, and, ultimately, increased financial freedom.

I was surrounded, for two days, by individuals who were aware of and leveraging resources that have the potential to transform the lives of my students and others like them. In the midst of this, I found myself at a table with three complete strangers. I was catching up on notes and eating my meal, when one of the others introduced himself. I told him I was a high school teacher in Detroit and then asked him what he did. He said said he was a gifts manager at a major agency in Detroit; his main project is funding the post-secondary pursuits of Detroit students.

I perked up. “Do you have a card?”

He handed me one.

I made it my job for the next few minutes to invite him to speak at our career day and to “sell” him on the mission of our school. Whenever I shared a fact or detail about the lived experiences of my students, he replied, shaking his head, “I already know. I already know.”

We parted ways to go to separate sectionals, but I found him again at lunch, and continued our conversation, sharing specific stories like the one about the brother (a freshman) and his sister (a senior) at my school who have dealt with homelessness and are now trying to navigate into more permanent living situations. I shared that one obstacle they’ve had is finding transportation to school since their new address is no longer on our bus line. I shared, “I do a little grass roots philanthropy, enlisting a small group of friends who help me out from time to time. One set of friends right now is financing Lyft and Uber rides for these two while we figure out a longer term solution. Their gifts are small compared to what you are looking at….”

He interrupted me and said, “but they add up to big wins.”

They do! I cant tell you the impact it has had on my relationship with these two students and the senior’s boyfriend, who is currently arranging all the rides because the siblings do not currently have a cell phone. The boyfriend, who had previously not wanted to engage in my class — who would barely speak to me — is now greeting me in the hallway, texting me on the weekend, and leaning in a little harder to academics. The freshman is trying to be just a little less squirrel-y (bless his heart), and his sister is growing up before my eyes, advocating for herself, navigating difficult waters, and trying to emancipate herself so that she can provide a space for her and her brother until he, too, is of an age to do for himself.

I was sharing this with my new friend, when he said, “Can you imagine what it would look like if my organization set up a fund to cover expenses like these?”

“I can!” I said, and I promised to email him the next day.

I returned home Thursday night to find an enormous pile of Amazon deliveries waiting for me — trail mix, more candy, beef jerky, cheese and cracker packs, an enormous box of potato chips, feminine supplies, deodorant, and on, and on, and on.

Big wins for my students, for sure.

Saturday, I participated in a small virtual conference put on by the MTLC. One of the speakers, Silver Moore, said she likes to picture each of her students as a hero on the hero’s journey, traversing through challenges, receiving supernatural aid and assistance from mortal helpers, on their way to transformation. She said, that “if indeed they are heroes on their journeys, they need us to tell them they are amazing.”

And I thought, “they really do!” They need my little group of friends to spoil them with snacks and Uber rides for their journey. They need the state of Michigan to provide “unprecedented funds” to overcome their challenges. They need the federal government to fund access to the technology that will help them navigate their paths, and they need philanthropic agencies to commit their resources in a way that signifies that they are truly heroes.

This is a message that is unfamiliar for students like mine. They don’t often hear that they are amazing. Instead they hear through both words and actions that they are simultaneously too much and not enough, that they are loud, wrong, and unworthy of a hero’s life.

So this week, I’m gonna haul a bunch of snacks into my room to celebrate my amazing students who are on various points of their hero’s journey. I’m going to tell them they are amazing, and I’m going to let them know that you are cheering them on.

We are the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ that might enable them to ‘run with perseverance the race that is set before [them]’.

Doing Fine

Featured ~ Kristin ~ Leave a comment
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Last spring, my supervisor asked me to take on the role of Reading Interventionist at our school. I’d been pointing out students’ low reading levels since the minute I walked into the building, so I knew there was a need.

She said I would continue with my main responsibility, teaching senior English — building literacy skills by way of career and college exploration. I would also continue to sit on the Leadership Team as the Master Teacher, offering support to other teachers, attending meetings, and managing a few additional responsibilities like once-a-week lunch room duty, hallway supervision between periods, and occasional projects like helping to plan career day.

My initial thought when she asked was an inaudible but nevertheless deep sigh — could I handle more responsibility? I was just finishing year two in the great experiment called, “Can Kristin really teach full time without triggering autoimmune distress and ending up back in bed?”

The first year, 2020-2021, I was alone in my classroom the entire year, meeting with students only in the zoom room. The tax on my body was minor. Yes, I had to drive 30 minutes each way, and yes, I had to plan for instruction and manage the grading stack for the first time in six years, but those things seemed fairly easy without the day to day drain that the management of student bodies, behaviors, and attitudes can be.

The second year was a bit more draining. To effectively manage a classroom full of kids, I had to relearn the strategies that I’d used in the past along with some new practices that are part of our culturally responsive model. The preparation and grading stayed mostly the same, but teaching in physical proximity with students, while much more effective and far more gratifying, is exceptionally more taxing. The fact that we moved in and out of virtual instruction provided me with intermittent periods of rest that probably allowed my second year back in the classroom to remain flare-free.

I’d made it two years with very little physical consequence, how much more responsibility could I add?

“We don’t have it in our budget to hire a full-time reading interventionist, but we know the need is there. You’ve got the background in reading from your time at Lindamood-Bell, so we’d like to eliminate your elective and give you that time for reading intervention with a select group of students who need the most support,” she said.

“Well,” I responded, “the need is definitely there, I do have some experience, so let’s talk more about what this would look like.”

A couple months later I started a continuous cycle of training in a program called the Accelerated Adolescent Reading Initiative (AARI), and we selected a group of freshmen. I rearranged my classroom to accommodate the design model of the program, obtained a whole bunch of materials, and prepared to meet my students.

They’re a lively little bunch — the eight I ended up with. They went into the Covid lockdown in March of their sixth grade year, and stayed there all the way through seventh. Last year, their school — the elementary building in our network — was virtual even more than we were. They were short several staff members all year long, and often didn’t have enough adults to safely open the building. Describing our freshmen as feral might be taking it a bit far, but all freshmen since the dawn of time have lacked maturity and self-control, and this group, having missed a great deal of school-provided socialization and having endured the societal trauma that was/is Covid-19, has even the most experienced of educators shaking their heads and digging deep into their training and experience to creatively manage their erratic, impulsive, and sometimes volatile behavior.

I only have eight of the them — the freshmen I affectionately call “my babies” — and even that small group has challenged me. It could be that 75% of them came into my classroom reading at a third to fourth grade level, and the other two came in reading at a first grade level.

What would you do in high school, if you were unable to read the materials that teachers were putting in front of you? Would you be quiet and compliant? Or would you find a way to entertain yourself?

Yeah, me, too.

Anyway, when I tested each of them individually in September, each acknowledged that reading had been “hard” and admitted that learning to read better is something that they’d like to do.

I have to remind them of that — when they won’t stay off their phones, when they are talking during instructional time, or when they are distracted by someone walking by in the hallway. I have to say, “Guys, why are we in this class? What is our goal?”

They respond almost in unison, “to be better readers.”

“What do we hope to find on our retest in January?”

“Higher reading levels.”

“Exactly. And if we want that, we’ve got to be together. We’ve got to do this hard work.”

And hard work it is. I tell them we are “dusting off the cobwebs” and remembering information they likely learned long ago — the sounds that letters make, how to break words into syllables, how to sound out words in chunks, and how to recognize sight words — and that part isn’t even AARI! That’s all Lindamood-Bell!

The core of every day is reading informational text and discovering the author’s purpose, the text structures, the evidence, and the organization. I document our process on giant sticky notes as we read each book and then, together, we map out the text. Finally, each student writes a summary and we take a text-based assessment.

For emerging readers this is very difficult work, but this week we got a pay off.

After a two-day effort to reset expectations after I’d been out of the building two days the week prior, we were back on track when the principal popped in for a visit. I say these students are my babies, but our principal has actually known most of them since they were in kindergarten. She is their strongest advocate. She fought for our school to offer this class; she’s actually still fighting to hire a full-time reading interventionist. She loves these kids with her whole life. Let me show you what I mean.

When she came in quietly, my students took note, and sat up a little straighter.

I asked them, “You guys wanna show off for Ms. Few?”

“”Yeah,” they said trying not to seem excited.

I took out a stack of cards to show her how quickly they can decode multi-syllable words like intersectional, combative, and defensively. Some are quick, but when they are not, we demonstrate how we identify the vowels, how we break the word into syllables, and how we sound out the chunks. One of my students — one of the two who tested at first grade level — demonstrates how he has learned to sound out a word like ‘drawn’ when even a word like “hat” was difficult not long ago.

She watches. She says, “Wow!” and “I don’t even know that word!” when one of my students decodes a nonsense word like prediptionally. Then she puts her hand to her forehead, covering her eyes, and says, “You’re gonna make me cry.”

My feral little freshmen beamed.

“But wait,” I said, “that’s not even the program! Do you have five more minutes?”

“Yes, I do.”

And she watched while we read the last page of the book we’ve been working on for three weeks. I ask, “What is the author doing here?” and one young man — a 6’3″, 120 pound baby — looks at his book and says, “He’s taking us right back to the first page of the book.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“The words on the last page are almost the same as the ones on the first page,” he answers.

“Yes, they are,” I say. “Why is he doing that?”

The student struggles for a moment. The other kids look at the first and the last page. They think. They struggle. And then they have it.

“He’s going back to the introduction.”

“He’s repeating the claim.”

“He’s making his conclusion.”

And the principal applauds. She says, “I can’t tell you how proud I am. I want to offer this class to the whole school, because when kids struggle with reading, they begin to get into all kinds of trouble. I can see how hard you are working. Do you feel like you are learning?”

And almost in unison, they say “yes!”

It’s been a hard nine-week journey to get to this point, my friends.

Is it a drain on my body? It is.

Does it energize my spirit? Unquestionably.

Am I beaming as brightly as my students? Obviously.

Do I think I can continue to manage this load? I think I’m gonna be fine.

For you make me glad by your deeds, Lord;
    I sing for joy at what your hands have done.

Psalm 92:4

**Freshmen are the most famished humans I have ever met. If you know a teacher of freshmen, offer to provide her with some snacks to have on hand. If you’d like to feed my freshmen, email me at krathje66@gmail.com and I’ll send you my wishlist.

of Death and Resurrection

~ Kristin ~ Leave a comment

Nadia* came to my desk the other day. The other students were working on an assignment, and she had a question about something she had missed a few days prior.

“I wasn’t here the day we did this,” she said.

“Yes, I remember. You missed a few days. Is everything OK?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she answered, “first my grandma died and we had all the arrangements for that, then my uncle died.”

“Oh my goodness! I am so sorry! That is a lot of loss all at once. I am impressed that you are working to get caught up. How can I support you?”

It’s not uncommon for us to hear about these kinds of losses. I myself lost a much-loved uncle last month, and many of us lost loved ones during Covid. However, it always shocks me when I learn of the amount of death my students have faced in their young lives.

Bianca* was sitting near my desk this week working on a college application. She was hoping it wouldn’t require a social security number because her mother had been reluctant to share hers with her when we had been getting FSA IDs, the first step in completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) .

“If it’s required, I’m just gonna call my mom and tell her I have to have it,” she said.

.”Does your mom want you to go to college?” I asked.

She shook her head no.

“Hmm. What would she like you to do?”

“She wants me to keep doing hair.”

“That’s right, you do hair. Is that what she does, too?”

“No, she doesn’t work, because my dad was a firefighter who died, so she is taken care of.”

“Oh my!” I said. “When did that happen?”

She held up three fingers and said, “Three years ago.”

“I am so sorry! I had no idea.”

And while we were chatting, her mom texted her the number, and Bianca completed her application.

Working with high school seniors, I see that kind of subtle movement all the time. One week a parent refuses to let their child have her SSN, then suddenly, nonchalantly, she sends it in a text two weeks later. Parents are ready to release when they are ready to release and not a moment sooner.

And it makes sense when you know that the mother and the daughter have already experienced devastating loss.

I’ve been listening to Anderson Cooper’s new podcast, All There Is, which is his examination of his own grief through conversations with others who have also experienced loss. Cooper lost his father to heart disease at age 10, his brother to suicide when he was 21, and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, just a few years ago. As he navigates the packing up of his mother’s things, he is struck by all the unprocessed grief from the previous losses and how raw the hurt still is.

As I’m listening, I hear his voice crack as he recalls a detail, and my throat tightens, My eyes well up and my chest feels heavy. I have not experienced much physical death among my immediate family and friends, but I have definitely experienced loss — the loss of my parents’ marriage when I was seven, the loss of some dreams for our family that were taken away, some by circumstance, some by error, and some by violence, and the loss of my health and career before I was even 50.

We all experience loss. We all experience death.

Cooper posits, and I agree, that we don’t make enough space for discussions of our losses and the hurts that we carry with us. Instead, we try to pack them up, put them away, and function in a way that seems “normal” when we will never feel “normal” again.

In one of his interviews, Cooper speaks with Stephen Colbert, who lost his father and two brothers in an airplane crash when he was 10. Colbert says it was the worst thing that happened in his life, but he has grown to be grateful for it — not the deaths, of course, but the opening it created in him that has allowed him to see the devastations in the lives of others and the ability to have compassion for them.

I resonate with that. For many years I have said that while my parents’ divorce was — for a long time — the biggest blow to my life, it grew in me an understanding of brokenness that prepared me to marry a man who had been divorced. Having stepparents prepared me to be a stepparent. Having experienced trauma and devastation in our own family has opened a chasm in my heart that has space for the brokenness I see in my students and my friends.

Because I have written about loss, and because my husband and I have explored our losses in depth with our therapists, with each other, and most extensively with a small group of friends who we meet with every week, we were prepared last spring and again this fall, to share our story with a small group of others like us who are in the midst of devastation and who are looking for shreds of hope. We believe, like Anderson Cooper, that we don’t talk about our losses — especially not in polite company, and even less in the church. Especially if those losses involve estrangement, divorce, sexual assault, alcoholism, drug abuse, gambling, or crime.

So when we stand in front of a group of church folk (last spring) or church workers (this fall) and tell our story, we do it as educators. We model — this is how you can be vulnerable and tell your story. We provide safety — you are in a room full of others who also have a story. We give space — take a chance, and share a piece of your story with someone next to you.

And they do.

And the tears flow.

Strangers touch hands and are no longer strangers.

It looks like resurrection.

Theologian and writer Jeff Chu asked in his opening talk at the 2022 Evolving Faith Conference** last weekend, “What does resurrection matter except to those have tasted death?”

What does new life matter, until you thought that life was gone forever?

When you have sobbed on your pillow knowing your family will never be whole again and then you see a connection, you receive an invitation, you embrace someone who has felt the rending of the flesh as deeply as you have and somehow what was dead seems to breathe new life,

Resurrection isn’t witnessed in isolation, is it? I find I see it most in community — in the sharing of stories, of tears, of understanding. I see it in friendships that walk through the valley of the shadow of death together long enough to get to the other side.

This fall I’ve had a student in my class, Monique*. Her attendance has been intermittent — she’s pregnant. When she comes, I greet her without judgment because I don’t know her story.; I only know that she has one. For the past week or more her seat has been empty. She didn’t appear to be full-term, so I didn’t expect that she had had the baby. I expected her to walk back in any morning, just as she had been doing all fall. But yesterday, I was standing in the office when her sister, a recent graduate, walked in. We chatted, and she mentioned that Monique had had the baby, but that the baby “didn’t make it”.

What happens to a seventeen year old heart when it has carried a life, moved through labor, and then experienced such a devastating loss?

I have no idea, but I am hoping to hear Monique’s story, and I am longing for her to experience resurrection.

[He] comforts us in all our trouble so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”

2 Corinthians 1:4

*All student names have been changed, of course.

**Although the Evolving Faith conference is over, you can still register and watch the entire event, which was virtual and recorded.

And, we’re off!

Featured ~ Kristin ~ Leave a comment

We just finished the second week of school and let me just say: All. Cylinders. Are. Firing.

From Monday morning at 8am to Friday afternoon at 4, the weeks are gonna be full, full, full.

Let me give you a glimpse. Mondays and Thursdays I spend three blocks — that’s 300 minutes –with seniors and one half block (50 minutes) with a small group of freshmen. From first thing in the morning until the very end of the day, all systems are go.

This past week, my seniors learned how we will respect one another in the classroom, explored my syllabus, and took the semester pre-test to show me what they already know. We also reviewed their SAT scores and had what I call “Real Talk” about where we are and where we are trying to be by the end of the school year. My students (and most students of color in urban areas across the country) have been broadly underserved educationally and their SAT scores show it. They’ve been underserved, and then they’ve spent their whole high school experience dealing with a pandemic. That’s right, my seniors went into lock-down as freshmen, spent their entire sophomore year “learning” remotely, came back for a repeatedly disrupted junior year, and are now trying to fully re-engage and prepare for college.

I need them to know from day one that we’ve got work to do. I don’t mince words. I say, “Look, we’ve got to look reality straight in the face if we want to accomplish our goals this year.”

“Sheesh, Mrs. Rathje, I feel like giving up right now.”

“Oh, we’re not giving up. Let’s pause for five minutes to catch our breath, but then we are right back to it.”

They took a 5 minute break, I called them back, and we were rolling — no time to waste here.

My freshmen — sweet babies — were hand selected because although most every freshmen in our building is trailing behind Common Core benchmarks, this little group of mine is the furthest behind of everyone. I spent the past couple weeks getting to know them, assessing their reading skills, and beginning to engage them in the arduous task of finding and filling in gaps in their literacy learning, getting their buy-in, establishing norms for how we behave in Mrs. Rathje’s class, and holding them to my expectations.

This little class, which meets every day from noon to 12:50 (pray for me!), has been 1 part “real talk”, 2 parts “you can do this!’, 1 parts “this is what we are doing”, and 1 part “this is what we are definitely NOT doing”. They are immature and a bit squirrely, but for whatever reason, they respect me and they know I am not playing. They lean in — they want to learn. And guys, the work we are doing is not easy or fun — I’m making them learn/remember very basic phonetic rules — we’re counting vowels, breaking words into syllables, clapping them out, and even playing games with flashcards.

Yesterday, at the end of our class, when the white board was covered with our notes — the words we broke up and the outline of the book we are reading, one of my students asked, “Mrs. Rathje, do you leave this on your board for your other students to see?”

“No, I do not. I will cover it all up. They won’t even know it’s here. I’ve got you.”

And the whole group collectively sighed.

They couldn’t have a bunch of seniors knowing that they are reading about what animals do in the winter, that they were discovering what the author’s claim was, that they had to break the word hi-ber-nate into chunks, or that we’re all learning the word adapTAtion.

And that’s just Monday and Thursday.

On Tuesday and Friday I meet with my freshmen, of course, but I also have about 300 minutes on each of those days for other tasks. Last week I filled those minutes by writing lesson plans, completing a reading assessment with a freshman, meeting with my instructional coach, returning emails, calling parents, supporting my student teacher, creating materials, grading assignments, and recording grades. The time fills up fast, and I often find myself scrambling to finish “one last thing” before I walk to my car at the end of the day.

I haven’t mentioned Wednesday yet. Wednesdays are typically what we call a “sprint” schedule. We see all seven of our classes in one day on a shortened schedule –typically less than 40 minutes per period with one additional period for social-emotional learning. This past Wednesday was an exception. All of our ninth through eleventh graders had to take the Academic Approach assessment which is a pre-test for the PSAT and SAT. It is computer-based and takes 3-4 hours. Because the seniors didn’t have to take this test, we decided to a) get them out of the building to limit distractions for the underclassmen, and b) get them on their first college visit.

Students filling out applications at EMU

Wednesday morning I found myself on a bus with 50 seniors and four other chaperones riding to Eastern Michigan University. Our students spent a few hours learning about EMU’s programs and touring the campus. Then, we boarded the bus and headed back to Detroit where we dismissed the students and I returned to preparing for the long day of instruction I would have on Thursday.

And before I new it, I was gathering my things on Friday afternoon, loading them into my car, and making the trek home. The week had flown by.

Not only were my days full, I had commitments at night, too.

On Monday, I left work to drive almost an hour to Chelsea where I have physical therapy about once a month. (I do still have to practice self-care if I want to keep pushing on the gas so steadily with my students.)

Tuesday was my first virtual meeting for the educational policy fellowship I am participating in this year where I learned that my working group will focus on policies that impact students’ post-secondary plans.

By Wednesday, I was out of gas. My husband was out of town, so I showered, crawled into jammies, and ate popcorn and garden vegetables while watching Arrested Development. Sometimes a girl’s just got to shut down.

Thursday night was for mental health therapy, and Friday night was for eating curry, watching Netflix, and nodding off to The Great British Baking Show — good old faithful wholesomeness to end the week.

And now? Now I continue to rest and refuel for the weekend because by the time you are reading this, we’ll be back in motion.

Teaching is hard work, but it’s good work. Teachers watch transformation happen right before their eyes — we set the climate and expectations, and because our experience tells us it’s going to happen, we wait and watch in expectation. It won’t be long before my little baby freshmen are reading like professionals telling me the author’s claim and supporting themselves with evidence or before my seniors are texting me from college saying, “Mrs. Rathje, I’m here! I’m setting up my dorm right now!”

We won’t get there by idling or pulling into the garage. No. The only way we’ll get there is by the everyday progress that happens by continually firing on all cylinders.

He who began a good work will complete it.

Philippians 1:6

Gem of the Week: Sam*

Featured ~ Kristin ~ Leave a comment

*Perhaps the Gem of the Week will turn into a series. Sam is a fictional name for a real person.

Click the arrow to listen.

I “met” Sam last year after seeing him regularly walking or running in the hallways during class periods. He’s what I affectionately call a “hall walker”. A hall walker is not a student who regularly asks for a pass to go to the bathroom or even one who is routinely late. No, a hall walker is a student who appears to spend at least as much class time in the hallway or the office as she does in her actual classroom. Hall walkers are clever; they have somehow managed to convince a number of authority figures at a variety of different times that they have legitimate reasons for being in the hallway.

I was aware of Sam, who last year was a junior, even though he was not assigned to my classroom. I didn’t know his name, but I was familiar with his face and the red jacket that he wore almost every day. Because my student rosters are mostly full of seniors, it is the exceptional underclassman who falls onto my radar, and when I say ‘exceptional’ in this context, it is not always a compliment.

One day, last winter, I was in the hallway on my lunch period, and I saw Sam, red jacket and all, flying down the hallway, away from a staff member who was asking him to come back. I overheard Sam call the staff member an expletive right before he slid back into his classroom.

I took note.

I did not track him down in the moment because he was finally where he was supposed to be, but I logged the interaction and determined to find out the student’s name.

It wasn’t the last time I saw such an interaction. Sam seemed to have a default emotion of “pissed”, as several of our students do, and for good reason. I didn’t know the whole story, but I knew there probably was one.

On one occasion, I happened to be walking down the hall side by side with Sam, and I spoke to him, calling him by name.

“You know my name?” he said.

“Yes. Do you know mine?” I asked.

“No.”

“I’m Mrs. Rathje. What grade are you in?”

“I’m a junior. How do you know my name?”

“Well, usually, if you’re not a senior and I know your name, it’s probably because you’re a hall walker.”

“Whatchu mean? I’m not a hall walker.”

“Well, I see you in the hall a lot.”

“That’s not me.”

“I’m pretty sure it is.”

And then we were no longer walking together.

But I saw him often throughout last school year. He was usually not where he was supposed to be, and he was usually running his mouth, stirring up negativity, as one does. I made a point to speak to him when I had opportunity.

“How’s it going, Sam?”

I didn’t always get a response.

But then, on the night of the Senior Pinning last May, when all of our seniors come dressed to the nines, and their parents stand next to them and “pin” them to show that they are nearly there, I walked into the hall, to find Sam, dressed in his red jacket, hovering near the registration table.

“Hey, Sam,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, but he looked different. He looked timid. He hovered near one of the senior sponsors, and waited for her instructions. He carried in boxes, he ran errands, he watched everything.

Our seniors strutted in, suited and heeled, hair freshly done, and shoes at high polish.

Sam stood to the side and watched, eyes wide, mouth closed.

A couple weeks later, he stepped into my room for the first time. I was between classes, and I looked up.

“Hey, Sam, what’s up?”

“Is your class hard?” he asked.

“No, I wouldn’t say it’s hard. Why?”

“Everyone says it’s hard.”

“I can’t imagine why. Everything is spelled out. You just have to follow directions. It’s no big deal. You worried?”

“Yeah. I’m a little worried.”

“You’ll be fine. You’re pretty bright — you have to be — you’re a hall walker.”

“I’m not hall walker.”

“Ok.”

The summer passed, and a couple weeks ago, we had our back to school open house. Who did I see first? Sam.

“Hey, Sam! Welcome back,” I said. “I hear you are in the dual-credit class that is going to Lawrence Tech twice a week. That’s amazing!”

“I ain’t doing that.”

“Well, you’re on the roster. It’s quite a privilege to go to college during high school. Only the brightest seniors get to go.”

“I ain’t doing it.”

“Ok.”

On the second day of class last week, I saw Sam again. He was visibly upset. He seriously did not want to go to Lawrence Tech twice a week. He didn’t think he would like it, and he didn’t want to be stuck there for his whole senior year if he hated it.

Two teachers were already speaking to him, but he was not budging.

“I ain’t going. I don’t want to go to college.”

“Sam,” I said, “you’re deciding that you don’t like it before you even get there. I can promise you, it’s a whole new world out there. You have to at least give it a try. You’re going to get to leave school twice a week — not everybody gets to do that. You were hand picked because we know you can do it.”

“I don’t want to do it.”

“Just go. Give it a chance.”

Other teachers continued the conversation, but he seemed resolute. He was not planning to go.

On Friday, I saw the small group of seniors — just 12 of them — as they got ready to get on the bus to go to their orientation. I looked at the group and said, “Have fun, guys! You’re gonna love it!” They were all clumped together.

I didn’t see Sam.

A few hours later, I found myself walking down the hall, in step with — Sam.

“Mrs. Rathje, I got my college ID!” he said smiling as he pulled it out of his pocket.

“You went! I knew you would love it!”

“Well, we ain’t been to the class yet. I probably ain’t going to like it.”

“But you got an ID! You’re on your way! I’m telling you — you’re going to love it. It’s a whole different world out there. I’m proud of you for going.”

“Thanks.”

Yup. Sam the hall walker said “thanks”.

He’s in my first hour class along with all the other kids who are going to Lawrence Tech twice a week. He sits in the back because that’s where he feels comfortable. He can’t see the board because he needs glasses, so he takes out his phone, takes a picture of my screen and blows it up to read it.

I walk near him, tap him on the shoulder and say, “Great use of your phone, Sam. Way to get what you need.”

We’ve only finished one week, and we’ve got a lot of heavy lifting to do between now and June, but I do believe I’m witnessing a transformation in progress.

I [can] see the goodness of God in the land of the living.

Psalm 27:13 Rathje Revised Version